07 April 2013

What
could persuade a seventeen-year-old boy with an extraordinary
personality and unusual levels of intelligence and self-possession to
take his own life – especially when he is convinced that happiness is
his unavoidable destiny? Unni Chacko believed that happiness is
inescapable, that human beings have a genetic predisposition to being
happy. But one morning, he returned from a haircut and jumped off a
balcony. And his family’s world snagged.

Set in Madras of the nineties (a Madras that this reviewer grew up in), The Illicit Happiness of Other People
by Manu Joseph, which begins three years after Unni’s death, when he
should have been twenty, chronicles the desperate search for answers
that leads a father into the underbelly of his son’s private life. Along
the way, Ousep Chacko encounters an intrepid group of cartoonists, a
neuroscientist, a silent nun, a corpse, and a whole host of other
idiosyncratic characters who sound as though they may have stepped out
of a Wes Anderson movie but are, in Joseph’s hands, perfectly reasonable
everyday individuals.

Ousep
is a failed writer, a perpetual drunkard, and an endless asker of
questions. His dysfunctional family seems to have no place in the quiet
faux-perfection of Balaji Lane – they are “the cuckoos among the crows.”
His wife Mariamma is the marvellous Bertha Mason of the story –
brilliant, delightful, wicked, tragic, and endlessly plotting the demise
of her husband. Mariamma is so markedly intelligent and so sharp
sometimes that the other characters seem ever poised to cut themselves
on her wit. But her sorrows have come to unhinge her and she spends her
days talking to walls.

Their
younger son, Thoma Chacko, just querulously stepping into adolescence,
is frightened of just about everything – his alcoholic father, his
ardent mother, his beautiful neighbour, his unknowable future. It is in
Thoma’s wide-eyed remembrances that Unni is best delineated and, in
fact, most missed. Thoma’s small world lodges the stormy malcontent of
middle-class drudgery and under-achievement, impaled into luminous
narratives that at once form the saddest and funniest parts of this
discerning book.

Just as probing as Joseph’s first book, Serious Men, although not as frequently funny, Illicit Happiness
is a hard look at the pursuit of happiness. Ousep’s interrogations
rupture the timid propriety of a social structure that longs to forget
its anomalies. But as Ousep’s persistence soon uncovers, Unni was never
the sort that could be swept under the rug. The people who knew Unni
remember him in different ways that don’t always unite. Some recall his
brooding quiet; some his flamboyant personality. But in everyone’s
memory, Unni is a beautiful boy who affected them; and almost anyone who
came upon him seems to have been utterly smitten with him in their own,
peculiar, often inexplicable ways.

When
the novel begins, a bizarre twist has convinced Ousep that the mystery
of Unni’s life and, therefore, his death can only be unravelled by
deciphering the comics that Unni illustrated, several of which are
generously described in the pages of the book. In fact, so intriguing
and clever do they seem that one wishes sketches and comic strips had
been included in the book. But these are petty quibbles that take
absolutely nothing away from Joseph’s wry and multi-layered tale.

Madras
is as much a character in the book as anyone else, redolently waxed
into the details with blithe humour. This is no nostalgia of the
romantic. Joseph exposes the many hypocrisies of Madras on the same
canvas as its beauties. His writing is unsentimentally exquisite; the
prose is languid and unhurried, didactically relying on loose precepts
and sweeping philosophies. Few writers can write stereotypes and mouldy
generalisations with so fine a grasp or so sharp an eye as Joseph, and,
therefore, few can be forgiven for them as easily as he can: “As things
are, it does not take much to be a spectacle on this narrow tarred lane.
It waits all day to be startled by the faintest hint of strangeness
passing through. Such as a stray working woman in the revolutionary
sleeveless blouse, who has the same aura here as a divorcee. A man with a
ponytail. A north Indian girl in jeans so tight you can see daylight
between her legs. It is as if such apparitions are a sign that the
future, which has arrived in other places, is now prospecting the city.
Here now is the final stand of an age, the last time one can profile a
street in Madras and be correct. Men are managers, mothers are
housewives. And all bras are white.”

It is hard to say just what sort of book Illicit Happiness is.
In parts, it is a psychological thriller, and in parts it is dark comedy;
then again, in parts it has the cavernous poignancy that has come to
characterise the very best dramatic fiction of our times. It probes
moral and philosophical quandaries with stupendous depth, and then
quickly pivots into searing satire. At every point, it is
thought-provoking and gently remonstrative. The book comes as a reminder
when we need it most that despite the many transformations of the world
there is still something very wrong with the way we bring up our sons.

3 comments:

"In fact, so intriguing and clever do they seem that one wishes sketches and comic strips had been included in the book."

A companion comic book would have been pretty cool, the descriptions of the comics were fascinating. Many of the passages written in Thoma's point of view were just so funny and dark, and I'm a big fan of how Joseph was able to capture his innocence, especially in the moments when he's thinking about or talking to Mythili.

"Few writers can write stereotypes and mouldy generalisations with so fine a grasp or so sharp an eye as Joseph, and, therefore, few can be forgiven for them as easily as he can.."

Superbly put. I wish more people understood this about Manu Joseph so that they stop labeling him as just another troll. It was so deliciously biting, funny and dark and for a setting in Madras, it can't get any more anomalous (at least from - again - what's stereotypically projected). So brilliant.

As Manu Joseph attested 'THE ILLICIT HAPPINESS OF OTHER PEOPLE' gives the reader a melancholy of pointlessness. his creation of character, ambience, conversation all are jst brilliant. we could see it right from his very first novel 'Serious Men'. Humorous way telling the story keep readers amused. I wonder how he managed to do that!

Im his new novel too characters are much similar to the dayto day life. Illustration of 1980's Madras, people living there, their hopes, dreams all are superb. " Madras in 1980's where all husbands are managers, women are housewives, and all bras are white"...what a cool way of expression.

I felt Mr.Ousep Chacko has some sort of similarity with his former character Ayyan mani in Serious Men. the silent Unni Chacko, KGB-PELE addicted Thomas chacko, Mariyammo, Somen Pillai, Mythili all characters are remains in my heart.

The illicit happiness of other people, indeed a 'brainstorming' one. Revelation of human mind, its complex and its subtle movement, psychological illusion, delusion, folly of the two,three,etc....takes readers into another world. Though humour takes the cource, i felt the novel a tragedy. For me THE ILLICIT HAPPINESS OF OTHER PEOPLE jst manage to gt the pass mark, not upto SERIOUS MEN.